1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to processing computer-readable documents, and in particular to a method of formatting a computer-readable document that has a plurality of objects having directly-assigned attributes.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer-readable documents like text documents, graphics documents, presentations etc. contain a plurality of formatted objects like characters, formulae, paragraphs, etc. In general, there are two ways of creating such formatted objects.
In a first way, a style or template is used that describes one or more attributes, e.g., bold, font color, font size, underline etc., of objects in a portion of the computer-readable document to which the respective style or template is applied. The formatting style or template defines the formatting properties of the whole document portion, such as a text portion. Typically, a style or template is applied to an entire computer-readable document, or to one or more objects with a document.
The other way of creating a formatted object in a computer-readable document is direct formatting in which the user assigns the attributes of a selected document portion directly using function keys or other input devices like a mouse. The format is directly defined for the selected document portion like a character, a text paragraph, a table, mathematical formula etc. by the user choosing the desired attribute for the selected document portion. Frequently, direct formatting is used within or for an object that uses a style or template to provide formatting other than that provided by the style or template.
In many cases, it is necessary to change certain attributes or style properties of a document like a text document during editing of the document. For example, a particular attribute like a color is not available on a specific output device like a printer, or is found to be less appealing than expected. If the user has generated the text only using a style or template, such an amendment is made rather easily by changing the attributes of the respective style.
In many cases, however, the user prefers to frequently use direct formatting when producing the text document. This may be faster or more convenient for the user. If, however, directly-assigned attributes in a large text document have to be changed, these changes must all be carried out “manually”, selecting every object having the directly-assigned attribute and changing the same. This process is awkward and time-consuming since the user wishing to change the directly-assigned attributes has to go through the complete document and change all appearances of these directly-assigned attributes.
In prior art consumer application software, styles or templates are stored, for example, in a separate subentry of the document. This subentry contains the name of the style, parent and child (or follow) styles and separate sections for defining paragraph attributes and character attributes. Other prior art applications save the styles in another block of the file.
Directly-assigned attributes are for example stored in a particular subentry in blocks of 512 bytes. In the document, text references to the subentry containing the directly-assigned attributes definitions and positional information about attribute changes are then included. Alternatively, all the information about directly-assigned attributes is included in a data block appended to a document portion like a text paragraph, in which the object with the directly-assigned format appears.